Should Politicians Be Tested for Dementia?

"Dementia is not a specific disease. Think of it as "cancer." Nobody has "cancer." They have "prostate cancer," "brain cancer," "breast cancer," or any of the other 200 types of cancer that have been identified. When you hear or use the word "dementia," it refers to how the brain processes information. You may have wondered what the difference is between "dementia" and "Alzheimer's." Alzheimer's is one of more than 100 types of dementia, although the most frequent type of dementia is Alzheimer's."

"By doing a linguistic analysis of unrehearsed communication (spontaneous speech), the presence of dementia may be found. While not as definitive as eight hours of neurological testing, it can raise red flags. Here are seven of the most important ones. 1. Semantically Inappropriate. Semantics refer to the meaning of a word or sentence. When someone "rambles," stories are often repeated and have little connection to what was just said or what follows."

Unrehearsed speech and language can reveal brain health and indicate the possible presence of dementia or Alzheimer's. Linguistic analysis of spontaneous communication can raise red flags and identify abnormal semantic, pragmatic, or coherence features. Dementia describes impaired brain information processing and encompasses many types; Alzheimer's is the most common type among them. Public cognitive checks often used by politicians are not diagnostic, but speech analysis offers supplementary evidence. Speech and language characteristics associated with dementia typically worsen over time, so progressive decline in spontaneous communication increases concern for underlying neurodegenerative disease.

Read at Psychology Today